Technical vision

PROARTIS begins from the observation that the underlying obstacle in existing state-of-the-art timing analysis techniques is the number of dependences present in the execution of the system. The execution time of each instruction is dependent on a number of factors (events), including the state of the performance-enhancing features of the hardware architecture, the state of the peripheral devices in the system, and in (Symmetric MultiProcessing) SMP architectures, the software which may be running on another core sharing the same system bus and RAM. A consequence of those dependences is that in order to appropriately track execution time, and hence WCET of a program, detailed knowledge is required of the system and the dependence factors impending on it.

Our strategy to reduce the cost of acquiring knowledge about execution state (and thus dependent on history) of a program-hardware pair required to perform trustworthy analysis is to adopt a hardware/software architecture whose execution timing behaviour eradicates dependence on execution history by construction.

Our objective is to try to quantify the amount of execution history dependence in current architectures and the cost of acquiring the knowledge to feed current timing analysis techniques for the attainment of tight WCET estimations.

One way to achieve the sought independence is via introducing randomisation in the timing behaviour of the hardware and possibly of the software (while the functional behaviour is left unchanged), coupled with new probabilistic analysis techniques.

An example of such hardware is a cache memory in which, in the event of a miss, the victim is randomly selected from any position in the cache. We call this unit of eviction/replacement, cache entry. Under this cache configuration, the probability of hit/miss for an access has a small dependence on execution history, in particular, the number of cache misses between the access under consideration and the previous access to the same address. Note that the hit/miss probability is different from the frequency of events. For instance, a memory instruction may have a 50% hit probability if every time it accesses cache we flip a coin and hit if and only if we get heads. Conversely, if the instruction hits and misses alternately, that instruction does not have a 50% hit probability but a 50% hit frequency. This is so because the outcome, and hence the latency, of each access is fully deterministic.

Applying time-randomisation techniques has inevitable consequences for the average case execution time of a program. Figure 2.1 illustrates the PROARTIS view of execution time. The execution time shift between deterministic and time-randomised architectures is marked (a): In general we expect the time-randomised profile to shift to the right (to increase) in relation to the deterministic profile, and to spread across a larger range of execution times. However the resulting distribution becomes more predictable: by decoupling timing events (e.g., cache accesses), they compose into a smooth curve, with a long tail describing execution times which are increasingly unlikely. Dependences between events in deterministic architectures can have an abrupt impact on execution time, producing discontinuities in the possible execution times which are difficult to model with a parametric distribution.

The absolute maximum execution time produced by the PROARTIS analysis will be many times greater than a conventional WCET, as it will correspond with the case where all instructions take the longest possible time to execute (e.g., every cache access is a miss). We expect instead to gain by tightening the gap between observed execution times and worst-case execution bounds using a probabilistic

confidence limit. The result of static analysis of deterministic architectures produces a degree of pessimism, where unknown states must be considered to have their worst consequences on the timing of the system. The `true WCET' lies somewhere in the range marked (b) in Figure 2.1, between the maximum observed execution time and the WCET bound produced by analysis.

In PROARTIS the consequences of these unknown states can be considered probabilistically, which enables us to reason about the WCET probabilistically. Techniques from Extreme Value Theory (EVT) are used to construct a worst-case probability distribution. We define worst-case bounds with stated confidence levels, which can be chosen to match the degree of uncertainty present in the rest of the system under analysis. This will allow a tighter WCET bound to be considered, which is area (c) in figure 2.1. We call this bound a probabilisticWCET (pWCET),

WCET estimates are then computed by considering the execution time at which the cumulative probability (ΣP) exceeds the required level of confidence. These confidence levels are expressed in Figure 2.1 in terms of the probability of exceeding the WCET threshold in any given run, however this figure should be adjusted based on arrival frequency to determine the probability per hour, or per year as necessary.